[2] Born into a wealthy banking family in Tianjin, he was sent to Merton College, Oxford to study Classics in 1936.

[4] Yang and his wife returned to China in 1940, and began their decades long co-operation of introducing Chinese classics to the English-speaking world.

Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, a government-funded publisher, the husband and wife team produced a number of quality translations.

Decadent: Notes Taken in an Outing (老殘遊記), also known as The Travels of Lao Can, and some of Lu Xun's stories.

He also translated Aristophanes's Ornithes, Virgil's Georgics, La chanson de Roland and Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into Chinese.